The Cove (from the US stills photographer Louie Psihoyos and his many friends in Hollywood), is clever in a different way to The Age of Stupid. It's made like an old-fashioned thriller—Oceans Eleven meets An Inconvenient Truth—without all the messy diagrams and scientific extrapolations. Psihoyos is as handsome as George Clooney and just as well connected. The film was funded by his best buddy, billionaire Jim Clark (well known in Australia for his recent marriage to the model Kristy Hinze). The mission is to get footage of something very bad going on in a quaint Japanese fishing village.

The town of Tarji is dominated by cute cetacean kitsch: dolphin temples, dolphin shaped boats, dolphin theme parks, and even dolphin burgers. But no-one has ever been able to penetrate 'the cove', were 23,000 wild dolphins, including nursing mothers and babies, meet their end every year. The whole enterprise is vigorously defended by a secret cartel of local operators who don't like publicity. So Louie's mates from Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas's special FX company) construct some camouflaged underwater cameras and in a furtive operation which rivals any mission impossible, the world's two top freedivers put them in place.

But the real love story of the film lies with David O'Barry, an old diver who once trained the dolphins for the international hit American television series Flipper. He holds himself responsible for popularising the performing dolphin industry, and has spent the past 35 years trying to save wild dolphins from humans. You probably don't know this, but the smiling dolphins in theme parks are not as happy and carefree as they look—they're on drugs! Most are so stressed out by performing in packed auditoriums they are force-fed drugs daily to deal with the side effects: stomach ulcers and depression.

The Cove is also clever in the way it extrapolates out from the horrors of the dolphin slaughter to the bigger story of the state of the ocean, which experts say will totally collapse within 40 years if we don't stop dumping crap in it and ripping out all the fish. In effect, by looking at nature The Cove shows us what it means to be human.